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Inevitable
Inside Rockefeller's Big Bet: The Global Energy Alliance with Ashvin Dayal
00:48:46
Ashvin Dayal is Senior Vice President for Power and Climate at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he oversees the Global Energy Alliance (GEA), a multi-billion-dollar initiative backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund to expand access to clean, reliable electricity worldwide. In this episode of Inevitable, Dayal explains why energy access remains one of the defining development challenges of the century, with roughly three billion people still lacking enough electricity to meaningfully power economic activity. The conversation explores how philanthropic capital can unlock private investment in markets that commercial investors often avoid, the rise of distributed solar and mini-grids in places like India and across Africa, and how programs like Mission 300 aim to electrify hundreds of millions of people in the coming decade. Dayal also shares lessons from a decade of deploying distributed energy systems, the growing role of digital tools...
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Today on Inevitable, our guest is Ashvin Dayal, senior Vice President for power and climate at the Rockefeller foundation, where he oversees their energy initiatives around the world, including the Global Energy Alliance, a multibillion dollar effort backed by Rockefeller, the Ikea foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund to bring clean, reliable electricity to those who still lack it. We've spent a lot of time on the show recently exploring the US Grid as it prepares for an AI Dr. Demand surge. But that conversation tends to leave out the 3 billion people on this planet who don't yet have enough electricity to run a small business, keep food cold, or power a water pump. Ashvin has spent over 30 years working on some of the world's hardest development challenges, from leading Oxfam's response to the 2004 Asian tsunami to building the platforms now electrifying rural India and Sub Saharan Africa.
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At scale.
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We get into what energy access actually means at a level that changes lives, how philanthropic capital unlocks private investment in markets commercial investors won't touch alone. What's really happening on the ground in India and across Africa. And a surprising nuclear report that Rockefeller just released from mcj. I'm Cody Sims, and this is inevitable. Climate change is inevitable.
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It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future.
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Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
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Ashvin, welcome to the show.
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C
Thank you. Great to be here.
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B
I am excited for this conversation to really dive into what's going on in emerging markets right now from the perspective of the energy transition. But I think before we do, you know, I was reading up on your background and before we dive into everything you've been building at Rockefeller, I want to start in 2004. You were running Oxfam's response to the Asian tsunami, which was obviously one of the largest humanitarian disasters of our lifetimes. I think it was the largest relief operation in their history. Just talk through what that was like on the ground.
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C
Wow, that's like now 22 years ago almost. I was leading Oxfam in Asia. And unfortunately, when that tragedy hit in December of that year and box on the 26th of December, I think it was, you know, I think what was really kind of both shocking and what resonated around the world was just how catastrophic a massive tsunami like that can be. Everyone initially thought it was more about the earthquake. And then they realized the tsunami was hitting not just the coast of Aceh, but parts of Thailand, and then all the way across the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka and parts of South India. So in a flash, in Aceh, in a matter of a few minutes, 150, 160,000 people were killed. And that kind of sudden, massive. On a coastline in a province that was already in the middle of a civil war, which people tend to forget now back then in that part of Indonesia. I think something about that just captured the imagination of the world in terms of just how devastating that event was. And Oxfam, as a humanitarian response agency, you know, we were ready to go and we started to raise a lot of money. People wanted to make sure that people on the ground were being looked after with water and sanitation services and helping to rebuild their lives. And so, yeah, I was on the ground a few days later, as soon as we could get to the site, actually on a US military C17 plane with a team. And over weeks and months, we sort of built up a. A response there. Obviously, you know, these kinds of emergencies have very sort of explicit stages. The first few days is really about recovery, you know, trying to kind of just provide relief. And then you sort of get into this slightly messier recovery phase where you're dealing with issues about how do people rebuild their lives, what happens to the land that their homes were originally on. There was still in the background this civil conflict going on. So how is that going to weigh into everything? It was a very emotional. It was a very overwhelming. But it was also, for me, a very sort of formative time in my professional life because it gave me exposure to just having to make decisions and be in a position of accountability and responsibility in a way that I had never experienced before and, you know, didn't really know what to expect.
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B
I can't even imagine the scope of the devastation that you must have witnessed, having been there shortly after the events. And to me, it's a good reminder of why all the work that, you know, those of us who work in the climate space do matters. This obviously was not a climate disaster. It was an earthquake that caused it. But we all know that climate disasters are increasing in scale and severity on an annualized basis and just being able to be ready to help those in need and see the kinds of devastation that natural disasters can bring. I don't know if that impacted the work you're doing now in energy and in bringing clean energy systems to emerging markets, but I can see the obvious parallels there and the obvious thread.
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C
Absolutely. And I think you're right. The tsunami itself was as a result of an earthquake, but the impacts of flooding and devastation you see all over, particularly Asia, where I'M from and Southeast Asia, you have some of the most vulnerable coastlines, so you have the sort of triple whammy of sea level rise and then you have more frequent intense storms, groundwater intrusion. All of these things coming together to create a lot of risk and vulnerability. And apart from working on the tsunami in those early years, I was doing a lot of work on flood response, flood preparedness. That then took me into almost a decade of work, actually working on what we were then calling urban climate change resilience, which was, how do you help all these fast growing cities actually prepare for and cope with the sort of multiple threats and vulnerabilities that climate change is bringing to those communities? And from there, working on energy for me has been probably the most unusual pivot, because you're right, clean energy is fundamental to mitigating the climate crisis and trying to limit the growth in emissions. But it is also what's so wonderful about it is it is also such a big, powerful unlock for economic opportunity, for development, for inclusive growth. So we don't have to get into this debate about is it development first and climate second, or is it climate first or development second? That's what sort of brought me into the world of energy. Cody it was not. I'm not trained as an energy engineer. I didn't work on energy for the first 15, 20 years of my career. And now as someone who's been interested in sort of development and economic opportunity in the context of climate change, I find myself working on an issue that's actually at the heart of all of this. And that makes it sort of really, really exciting, especially given how dynamic that whole sector is with the technological changes and the geopolitics of it all. It's fascinating to be working on these issues.
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B
Let's jump right into that. I'm really interested to hear your perspective on energy access. And what does energy access really mean, particularly in emerging markets at a level that can drive substantial change for people's lives? You know, I think there are different international bodies that have created sort of different levels of energy access. And it feels like a lot of the conversation is about, you know, do you have access to lights and can you charge a cell phone? But that's very different than can you process clean water at scale for your community, can you run a small business, can you create vaccines locally to your community? How do you think about where we are today and where we need to be in the world with respect to access to clean power?
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That's a great question, because that is at the heart of what we are every day at the Rockefeller foundation trying to work on and think about, how do we, how do we think about this sort of spectrum? You're right. Basic energy access is kind of this binary thing. And if you think about it in terms of power systems or electrification, which is what we do a lot of our work on, is somebody connected to a grid or an off grid solution or not? And the answer to that question, if it's yes, that is for some people at a very basic level, still extremely transformational. I'm certainly not one of those people who sort of diminishes the value of lighting or being able to charge your mobile phone in your house because it has massive benefits. Even just that from a safety perspective, from kids being able to study later into the evening and improve their grades. And there's evidence to show that. And there's still something like 750 million people who just don't even have that, don't even have that space access. It's almost, that's 10% of the planet in 21st century when we can do so many amazing things. That to me is the building block of energy access. We have to. We can't talk about economic development, growth or energy abundance or all these wonderful things if we're not actually going to achieve universal energy access, energy for everyone, everywhere. But you're right. Then you get to the question, well, how much energy? When you talk about energy access, how much is enough to not just have the lights on in the house, but to power small business, to kind of move up that productivity chain where if you're a carpenter, you can move from handheld manual tools to mechanized tools and double treble your productivity. If you're a farmer, you can start to do some on site processing of your wheat crop or your rice crop. You can do the rice husking, you can have some cold storage and refrigeration so you can protect the value of your crops. That stuff is more than just that basic energy access. So there we talk about something called the modern energy minimum. And this is a little bit wonky in terms of the numbers, but basically bring it on.
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Let's get into the wonk. I love it.
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So the average American consumes per capita about somewhere between 12 and 14,000 kilowatt hours or units. As you would get on your bill from Con Edison or wherever you're living. There's about 12 to 14,000 units of electricity per year. That's a lot. It's not the highest. There's some countries that are higher than that. But That's a lot of electricity per capita. That is definitely energy abundance. You have an abundant consumption of an abundant amount of electricity. When we talk about the modern energy minimum, we're just talking about 1,000 kilowatt hours. But there's still about 3 billion people on the planet who are not even at that 1000 level yet. And the 1000 is what we think is that the first step towards being able to have electricity that not just improves your life, but improves your livelihood. The things that I mentioned earlier, the power tools, the refrigeration, the sort of local economic benefits that can come from having this kind of electricity in your house.
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It goes from basic health and services to I can actually use this to generate more income for my family, 100%.
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I mean, I was actually in India just two weeks ago visiting some projects in Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest state in North India. It's got 250 million people just in that one state alone. And you know, the government has been very successful at actually extending electricity in India to the bulk of the population. But there's still massive issues about reliability. So there's, there you're seeing rooftop solar that we in partnership with something called the Global Energy alliance, have been supporting so that women in this case are setting up, able to set up small businesses, enterprises with machines and motors, and they're quadrupling or 5xing their incomes. They're doing in this case the milling flour and then selling it to the local schools actually for the school feeding programs. So that kind of power takes more than just that minimum basic access. That's that modern energy minimum. So when I think about energy access, we have to get to at least that level of consumption universally around the world so that people are able to see that opportunity for upward mobility in their lives and their livelihoods. Now we need to go beyond that. When we talk about abundance and industrialization and larger scale economic growth, then I think you're getting into the at least the sort of 4,000 per year per capita. That's still a third of what the average American consumes. So we're not talking about a world in which everyone needs to consume 12,14,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. But we're certainly got a long way to go to get to that notion of energy abundance.
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And what was the number again of roughly people Under a thousand kilowatt hours and above?
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Somewhere around 3 billion or under a thousand. What are we at about 7 and a half billion on the planet now? Close to 8 billion. So that's A significant portion of the population. And what's fascinating, Cody, is like, you know, my background has been in sort of economic development and poverty work in some of the poorest parts of the world, from Afghanistan to India to parts of Myanmar back in the early tens. When you map non electrification and low energy consumption with other indicators of development, poverty or economic development, it's almost the Venn diagram is almost a perfect overlap. So it has become the sort of single most powerful predictor of extreme poverty, of underdevelopment, that thousand kilowatt hours with 3 billion people. To me, that's the world that we have to change.
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I want to spend the bulk of the rest of this conversation talking about how maybe to do that. Describe the work you've been doing inside the Rockefeller Foundation. You created a new organization with, I think one of the largest, if not the largest gifts that Rockefeller has made, focused on the capital stack problem in energy. Maybe first give people just the overview of the Rockefeller foundation and then describe geapp that you've created and what that's all about.
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The Rockefeller foundation has been in existence since 1913, so it's 110, 112 years old. So it's a very storied philanthropy set up by John D. Rockefeller and has over the course of that century plus worked on big systemic challenges around the world and in the United States. If you think about our work in three big chapters over that 100 plus years, the first chapter was very much around building the field of public health, investing in schools of nursing and schools of medicine, fighting diseases at the time, things like hookworm in the south of the US as well as elsewhere in the world, and yellow fever and you know, all of these diseases that were sort of communicable diseases largely. The second chapter sort of came after World War II when, you know, the world was sort of gripped by the fear of hunger and being unable to produce enough food to feed a very fast growing planet. You'd have the baby boom, the population was growing and you had all these sort of Malthusian nightmarish scenarios that, you know, we were going to run out of food. And so the foundation invested over decades in addressing that food system question about productivity and seeds and capacities in countries, countries from India to Mexico to Philippines and everywhere in between. It was incredibly successful. And we sort of coined that phrase, the Green Revolution, which is famous for that era in the 60s, 70s, 80s, when we really did overcome the sort of global food shortage crisis. That doesn't mean we overcame hunger, but in terms of physical availability of Food on the planet. We really did make remarkable progress. This is kind of that third chapter, the recognition that energy in the 21st century is at the heart of unlocking economic and development opportunities. So the work started about 12 to 15 years ago, actually. And it started on the back of a recognition that technologies were now making things possible in a way that just wasn't the case 20 years ago. The price of solar had dropped, battery technologies were improving, new business models were emerging. And you started to see this first wave of companies showing up, interestingly in India first who were trying to do what was called off grid or mini grid electrification. Okay, the grid's stuck. It's never going to come to us. They're state owned, they're inefficient, sometimes corrupt, but what are we going to do? People aren't going to wait another 20 years to get the kind of energy they need to participate in the modern economy. So these really dynamic new companies, OMC Microgrid Corporation in India, Husk Power, that's now working all over Africa as well, we started a dialogue with them saying, look, what is it going to take? Because as exciting as this space was, and to your point about the capital stack, there was still incredible amounts of risk in trying to set up these businesses in rural areas. There was operational risk, there was offtake risk, there was all these things that made running these kinds of businesses tough and probably not commercially viable without some concessionality. And that's where we started to come in and build relationships with some of these companies. What would it take in terms of more concessional, longer tenant debt or even some grant finance to get the first wave of project development done and help defray some of those costs, essentially put a little bit of a cushion in there for these companies to be able to take off. But getting the balancing act right so that you're not then creating a sort of a market distortion that means that they're never actually going to be able to succeed. And it was a heavy lift. But we grew this over time in India and then we started to do stuff in Southeast Asia. Eventually we, in about 2018 said, well, actually the big gap is in Sub Saharan Africa, so we've got to start working there. Very different market, very different context. And that's around when we as a foundation under the leadership of our President, Dr. Raj Shah, said, actually this is going to be one of the biggest things we, we really can do for the planet over the next 15, 20 years. And you're right, that is when we made our largest single investment in Our history, when we chose to, our board approved a $500 million commitment and we created the Global Energy alliance for People in Planet, or GAPP as you called it. Because what we felt was needed was not just money going into projects, but also an institutional formation that could build an alliance. Because there's so much capital all over the place. How do you get it? Bring it together from public capital to the private capital to government systems, all kind of doing things in a very fragmented way. And that's really why we built the alliance.
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So the idea is that GAPP comes in with really first loss capital on these primarily clean energy projects around micro grids or the like that can come in and basically help reduce the risk capital for, I assume first DFIs and other philanthropic organizations and eventually commercial capital to grow an energy ecosystem in these markets. Is that the right way to think about it?
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Exactly the right way to think about it. And I would say sometimes it's first loss that doesn't even sit in the capital stack formally, right? There's enabling environment work, there's policy support, there's technical assistance. And then sometimes it's formally inside the capital stack. You know, whether it's with an individual project like a company like an OMC or a HUS that we invested in, or it's in a fund that is trying to invest in portfolios of companies in this space. So the cross boundary Energy Access in East Africa is a good example of that, where our capital can come in as the junior most in that stack and try to unlock these other layers of capital. And you're right, the next layer up is usually the DFIs.
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Describe what first loss means, maybe for our listeners in benefit to understand what that means, that you're taking on the bulk of the risk there.
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Everyone is applying commercial capital with a certain return expectation. And to put it very crudely, if a commercial investor is expecting, let's say a 12 or 15% return, and we know that the modeling of this project is going to be really only delivering an 8 or 10% return, then we create a waterfall where we can say, well, we can take a zero return so that on your equity you can get the full 40 or 16%. So that's one way of thinking about first loss. I mean, then there is actual loss, right, where we're willing to in a commercial project, willing to be the investor that actually does not see their capital return and takes that first tranche hit when another investor then doesn't have to take that risk.
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I come at things from a venture Capital perspective where we may have losses just because the tech itself didn't work the way people thought it might work, or the market didn't develop the way people thought the market might not develop. In emerging markets, it's. I think it's less about a technology risk at play, it's more about external factors, regulatory problems, currency issues, etc. Like, what are some of the biggest risks that the projects you're coming into are often trying to overcome?
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Well, you're right, it's very rarely is it a technology risk other than the cost of technology, which is, you know, obviously something that we all have to manage. It is all of those things. It is policy and regulatory risk to take the off grid electrification. Many countries didn't have any kind of regulation about whether a company can go out into a rural part of the country and start putting up some poles and wires and smart meters and selling to people. And what is the, you know, this is a highly regulated area, electricity grids and utilities, but only where it exists. And where it doesn't exist, there's no regulation. So just the existential risk of like, well, what happens if the grid arrives? If I'm an off grid operator and the grid finally shows up, might suddenly just booted out of there. So creating. We spend a lot of time, including back in India in 2016, saying, okay, well what would be a useful rational policy and regulation for governments to have to stimulate the sector and give investors some level of, some protection against those kinds of risks? You definitely have currency risk and political risk. I mean, local currency financing is probably the single most frequently cited issue that is holding back investments in this space, particularly in the.
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I think Nigeria just went through a major currency fluctuation that I'm sure had challenges with projects there.
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Of course, a lot of the time you're getting investors lending in dollars or investing in dollars and you've got your revenues are all, in the case of Nigeria and local Naira, you get a 50% devaluation. All of a sudden all of your projections and your repayments have been thrown completely haywire. So we do work on those kind of what I call those first loss things that don't sit in the capital stack. So for example, we work with commercial banks in Nigeria to say, can we put a guarantee in place with you so that you can lend in local currency and we can take some of the fluctuation risk. If you're working with other investors from outside Nigeria, we did a project there that's been really interesting when you get to currency risk and political risk. You're getting into areas that then are no longer just about the energy sector. I mean, you're getting into the entire question of investment, the investment environment for a country as a whole. And you're getting into bigger challenges than just what our sector alone can address. And so you have to decide where you're going to draw the line in terms of how far up the chain are you going to try and go. Because we're not in the business of trying to fix countries. Right. We're trying to invest in projects. But you realize if you just stay at the project level, that's not enough. You have to figure out where in the enabling environment, in that ecosystem, can you try and do something that will be beneficial to multiple projects, not just the one that you're investing in.
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What is it about clean energy that enables this model to be effective, or at least seems like it's effective? You can probably share some of the proof points that show it's effective in a way that traditional forms of energy didn't need. Like I don't think oil and gas had like a heavy philanthropic arm coming in prior to build out of markets. It's an extractive technology. So there's different sort of economic reasons for that, but I'd love to hear you articulate them.
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I think the biggest difference is the scale and the modularity of these new technologies. You know, we often think of electrification and power systems in terms of the generation side. So yes, you can have a massive coal fired power plant, or a gas fired power plant, or a diesel power plant, whatever those, they have very high energy density. You know, they do what it says on the tin, so to speak.
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Right.
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They are very effective as generators of heat and conversion into electricity. That does nothing to solve the last mile distribution problem. So that's where I think the breakthroughs in locally deployed renewables that are highly modular. You know, you can put in a 30, 40, 50 kilowatt unit in a small village in Zambia or in Senegal, or in Malawi or in India that is serving maybe 200 households and you have fully integrated generation and distribution on site and you're completely decoupled from the grid. You could in theory do that with a small diesel generator. But when we think about our power systems and their success in terms of. And I would challenge the idea that they've not needed subsidy, they maybe haven't needed philanthropic subsidy as much, but they've
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certainly been sectored, had plenty of subsidy,
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you're right, plenty of subsidy, just in a very different way. I mean, the US achieved 100% electrification with a lot of subsidy. So to me, subsidy is not a bad word. The question is, can you sustain that in a way that unlocks. Does it unlock a commercially scalable and replicable model?
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And I would say a lot of the oil and gas infrastructure was. I mean, subsidized isn't. I mean, was definitely subsidized, but was also heavily funded by sovereign wealth. A different kind of. Not really first loss capital, but it had an endemic interest to the success of those projects.
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Yeah, absolutely. And we're looking for what are the analog to that today for these kinds of projects that we're working on and how do we get large philanthropies, even sovereigns, who are looking to diversify and invest more in clean technologies in solar, wind storage, which is a huge part of this conversation. So you're absolutely right. But it's that modularity, I think, that really is the thing that has made this possible, that has allowed a whole new generation of companies to enter the space and be part of this sort of electrification revolution. That's being where you're building the grid kind of from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Right. It's not just this heavily centralized grid that you slowly extend to remoter parts of the country and, you know, we'll get there when we get there. Well, it's an overused analog, but it's a little similar to the way cell phone technology just kind of blew past landline technology in many of these countries. You know, you can still just about get a landline in the U.S. i guess. I don't know, I haven't had one for a while. But you certainly could never.
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I don't even know if you can. In certain markets, they won't even give it to you.
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Yeah, I don't know. I haven't even tried, so. But the point is you never could in many of the places that have thriving cell phone ecosystems in Somalia, places like that. So think of it in that way. Like these technologies are allowing us to kind of bypass an infrastructure model that still has a role to play, but was not going to solve quickly enough the problem for the last mile.
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B
Let's get into a few specifics. I know you've been working on a large project in India, I believe, called Smart Power India for more than a decade. Maybe share some of the specifics of that project. What's worked, what you've learned. Is there anything that at any point almost killed the project that is a good takeaway for how these might change going forward.
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C
So Smart Power India is kind of like my. It's the thing that gets me teary eyed in some ways because I've been associated with from the start and we kind of touched on it earlier when we were talking about companies like husk and OMC. So we started it in officially in about 2014 or 2015, so over a decade ago. It actually has subsequently folded in to this larger Global Energy alliance project. So Smart Power India is now part of the Global Energy alliance and it's just the Global Energy Alliance India. But what that really was doing was trying to prove the case for off grid and distributed electrification. And we were the first investors in a whole range of mini grid companies in India that then evolved into working with rooftop solar suppliers and now more recently actually doing large scale agricultural solarization where you're working with a farmer who's got say 10 hectares of land and you're going to them and saying, well, you know, if you converted one hectare into a solar farm, a one megawatt solar farm you can sell into the grid because the grid now exists there. But you can also ensure local supply to like 400 surrounding farms. And then you're providing reliable daytime power that feeds into irrigation, cold storage, everything. So this thing that we set up in India has been phenomenal. I mean, tens of millions of people have been now seen sort of new or improved access as a result of these kinds of projects. Again, a few months ago I was in Rajasthan, which is this kind of desert state in western India. So solar is extremely effective there where you know, something like 2 gigawatts of off grid, angry based solar has now been deployed with the help of our project, which is the Global Energy alliance, which was formerly known as Smart Power India. But to your question about the nightmares. So it all sounds great, right? But obviously it's been a heavily up and down journey. It gets back to something I mentioned earlier which was like India then made this massive push in 2014 or 15 to spread the grid. They were like, ah, the government was like, I'm not so sure if this distributed stuff is going to be, you know, that effective. We're going to push the grid out everywhere. And they frankly subsidized a massive scale up of the grid. And so we were dealing with exactly that question, like, okay, all these companies have started to set up these small mini grids. Are my businesses now going to collapse? And so that was a moment of real kind of risk for us and for the work. I mean, if the grid had been effective and reliable, then, okay, great, at least people are getting what they need and we can manage the risk to the companies. But actually what turned out was they were extending poles and wires, but they weren't providing reliable 247 power. So these companies started to adapt and pivot their model and saying, well, we coexist with the grid. We're not the first switch that you put on, but we're the uninterrupted power supply. We are the reliability plate. Because if I'm running a workshop from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, I can't afford to have like eight hours where I don't have power. So I'm now taking power from a mini grid company. Maybe not for my nighttime needs, you know, at 10:00 clock at night when I'm back in my home, but just to make sure that I'm able to run my workshop all day rather than having to buy a diesel generator, which would be more expensive. So you're displacing diesel and you're ensuring reliability. So it becomes a kind of a business continuity play. And so these companies have just been really nimble in adapting their model and it's just continued to grow and grow and grow and it's, it's really remarkable. It is transforming the landscape.
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B
Do you see a future where these mini grid providers stay as this, you know, as the grid expands, stay essentially as backup power to the grid? Or do you see them being independent power producers for the grid or all the above? I don't know.
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C
I think it's going to be a bit of both. But the trend is definitely towards what we call interconnected mini grids. So governments and utilities are getting smart to the idea that, okay, there are all these assets out there. Distributed energy resources are a way of the future anyway. Even in modern electric grids in the US and in Europe. How do we leverage this and actually strengthen the grid overall? So if I've got 30, 40, 50 gigawatts of highly modular solar resources sitting around the country that were originally designed as completely isolated assets, if we have the right regulations, if we have feed in tariffs available to these providers, can we actually start to create that sort of mesh integrated grid of the future? And that's the direction I think all of this is going. And not just in the west and in wealthy countries, but in places like India, Nigeria, we're seeing it happen everywhere.
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B
How in the world do you manage a system like that? I'm thinking from a grid operator lens of, oh, I've got all these independent Producers. I need to manage consistent frequency across the grid. I need to manage overproduction so that I don't ruin everyone's economics overnight or vice versa under production. And we have brownouts everywhere. That seems like an incredible coordination challenge.
- [32:43]
C
Fabulous question. That is exactly the problem we are now backing into. Because you're right, you've got frequency modulation, you've got voltage fluctuation, you've got brownouts, you've got peak demand, you've got all these other things. A lot of the utilities around the world, Cody, particularly in the developing world, they are pretty low on capacity, they're not very innovative and they're sort of, they're struggling. They have pushed electrons one way. That's what they've been built and designed to do for a century, right? Over a century. So what we are now working on is the whole area of creating digital twins. How do you digitize, completely digitize, utilities and all of the distributed assets? We've just completed the Global Energy alliance has just completed the first full digital twin of something called the Jaipur Discom. The distribution company, which is, has about 18 million consumers, not connections, but users. So it's about 5 million connections. And it is giving this utility for the first time a full visualization of the grid in 15 second intervals. And also you can actually isolate green and brown electrons which are the electrons coming from green resources like solar, which are the ones coming from the national grid where they're drawing in coal fired power. In this case it's largely coal. In the, the case of India it could be something, it could be hydro, it could be gas in other markets. And it's just we have to basically do this in hundreds of utilities around the world. And that's actually the other big pillar of what the global LNG alliance is working on. That's the only way we're going to be able to bring all of this together in a way that's manageable by utility. And this first use case in Jaipur is really exciting. There are now 10 utilities in India that have signed up to go through the same process. And some of them are much larger. And the thing is it saves them money as well. So it's helping them reduce technical losses, it's helping them sort of reduce the amount of renewable curtailment they have to do because they can just manage all their resources much better. So they're going to pay for this.
- [34:45]
B
I mean, I can't tell you how many startups I talk to in the US that are trying to use AI to do orchestration of Grid resources so that you can manage data center load depending on when there's peak power need or not. But my goodness, what you've just described in India for example, sounds like a potentially even crazier challenge to try to go after in terms of just the number of disparate resources you're trying to track and manage at once.
- [35:12]
C
And it's a combination of low tech and high tech in terms of how you even digitize the grid. I mean we, in the case of Rajasthan, we worked with this phenomenal startup there called Edge Electra. A great young group of young, highly talented engineers, data scientists, AI experts came together and they're using everything from very sophisticated drones, but they've also got guys on E scooters with little apps like literally taking photographs and then uploading it all into this one server that then creates a visualization for the utility, then training the utility on how to use it and then creating the license so that the utility will pay for it every year. And that's the point about it's saving the utility money already. It's just phenomenal. This is going to be a game changer. Within five years if you can have hundreds of utilities with this capability, we will be at the next level of trying to get to that ultimate goal of universal energy abundance.
- [36:06]
B
We talked about India where we have this phenomenon of micro grids and then the grid expanding into them. Let's talk about Africa, which is a. Africa is a very large place, but you have your own goal in Africa I think called mission. 350 different situations going on across the African continent that maybe you can share a little bit about. And the approach in some of these
- [36:27]
C
countries and of course Africa is you know, 50 plus countries and each one of them is very different. I think there are a few things that are different from India that are quite common across Africa. One is much, much lower rural density. When you go into rural India you see a lot of people and it's like, okay, I could put a mini grid here and there's going to be customers and within a two kilometer radius I can run a mini grid and it'll probably work. That's not the case in many parts of Africa. There what you're seeing is much more reliance on even smaller systems. So sort of 510 kilowatt sort of solar home systems, standalone productive use appliances, you know, solarized irrigation pumps, things like that. Because a mini grid could even be an over engineered solution in some cases in Africa. That's just one general comment I'd make Mission 300 is an effort that was actually launched by the World bank and the African Development bank that we, as the Rockefeller foundation, along with the Global Energy alliance and another group called Sustainable Energy for All, we came together and said to our colleagues at the World bank, the president, Ajay Panga, and at the time, Akin Adeshina, the African Development bank, had said, look, this is not just about electrifying 300 million people. This is about actually creating an economic development opportunity for the continent that could be the most consequential thing that's happening there for the next 15, 20 years. Let's work together on it. Yes, connections are part of it, but so too is how do we wrapping around that additional economic development activity. So what we're doing with them is they've got the big public finance, right? They've committed close to $40 billion to invest in this over the next five years to reach 300 million people. By the way, that's still only half the unelectrified population of Africa at 600 million. So it sounds like a big number, but the job will not be done. To their credit, they sort of opened up the doors and said, okay, let's work with philanthropies, let's work with technical partners. Let's figure out how we do this in a way that isn't just about kind of traditional infrastructure, but actually turns these into opportunities for innovation. Get the kind of startups that I just described in India and there are companies like that in Africa as well. You know, we work with Delta 40, for example, that's working with an incredible range of companies in Africa that can be a big part of this story. So we're helping with providing some of the technical assistance for that. We're setting up in 15 countries. We've already set up 15 compact, or what we call delivery and monitoring units for Mission 300, so that the government has the capacity to actually absorb this money, run these projects, build out these connections, and attract the additional financing that's needed for these projects. You know, we helped convene at the start of 2025, 27 heads of state came together in Dar es Salaam to pledge this as part of their development and economic future. Not just about, you know, electrons, but really about livelihoods. So it's a huge effort. It's going to take an alliance of partners, and that's what the Global Energy alliance and us are sort of really trying to move fast. Last thing I'll say about it is it's already more than doubled the rate of electrification on the ground in Africa just since it was launched about two years ago. So we now have 43 million people who've been electrified under Mission 300. Long way to go, but that's an incredible start.
- [39:47]
B
Do you see a clear path from getting rooftop solar for your home for again the basics that we talked about, power in your home, charging your phone. Do you see a clear path path from those projects to a more livelihood based mini grid system that can help a community with persistent small industrial power?
- [40:09]
C
Absolutely. And I think we're getting much smarter knowing when and how the conditions exist to be able to actually move to that level. Look, people can't eat electrons, right? So you have to be able to think about the synergy between the arrival of power and the creation of economic opportunity. And it's kind of a iterative, mutually reinforcing thing. You have to do both things together. So what we're doing a lot of, in the case of some of the countries in Africa, Zambia as an example, where again I visited fairly recently, is saying, okay, if electricity comes here, what are the associated investments that would need to be made so that users of electricity can quickly ramp up their demand and start to generate a consumption pattern for electrons that feeds into producing goods and services that creates the sort of flywheel for economic development. So getting those two things kind of converged is the big sort of secret sauce here. And what's great is with all of the data that we have today compared to 10 or 15 years ago, and our ability to use AI to generate models, where will this work? Where will it not work? We can actually be far more precise in trying to do exactly what you're saying and that's exciting. And that again, since I started, this work has been a massive change in capabilities to be able to do this.
- [41:25]
B
I'm going to ask a slightly off topic question, but related, which is you all at Rockefeller recently released a report about nuclear and small modular reactors which felt like a curveball. Like you guys have been such a champion of solar and storage and microgrids. It seems like you're jumping on the nuclear train too to some extent. Maybe describe what has you excited there and how far off you think that is from being able to be an on the ground reality.
- [41:53]
C
Yeah, and you're right, it's not something that we've been actively working on over the last few years. And I think the answer really comes down to the state of the technology and the related issues around safety and dependability, reliability, et cetera, especially with SMR technology, which is generally considered anything under 400 megawatts. If we want to accelerate the decarbonization of our energy systems globally, one of the big things we have to think about is how are we going to accelerate the reduction of coal and coal fired power, which is still a huge, huge source of emissions. This is where I think the SMR technology could be a game changer because it's actually a very good alternative in terms of providing firm base load power. The thing that governments are terrified of when you start talking about changing the energy mix is PV and solar and wind and all of that. They have some limitations in terms of what they can deliver on a grid. So we started looking at this question recently, as you said, and we put out a report talking about, you know, how do you bring down the total cost of an energy system and what role could nuclear as part of your pathway? It's nuclear with renewables, with other energy resources. What could that look like? And this is a model set of scenarios. It's sort of a way to get a conversation and a dialogue going. Our motivation in this is to say if smarts are 10 years away, I'm not going to crystal ball whether it'll be 2032 or 2034 or 2035. But they're coming and we know that. What can we do today to help countries that really should be thinking about it to help them create the conditions so that when the technologies and the price points are getting closer to deployability, they have created the conditions to be able to then adopt and receive investments in those. Because there's a huge amount of regulatory work, there's capacity building that has to be done. These are complex technologies and that's why we released them report. It's non emitting power that has to have a role in the future if we want to see coal diminish in its dominance more quickly. Because you're not going to ask countries to stop generating power, that's just not realistic. So we have to have an alternative. So that was the motivation. I don't know if it was a curveball, it was a bit of a departure from what we've been focused on, but we're serious about it.
- [44:05]
B
It is an energy source that is less sovereign, I guess, for the lack of a better term than solar and wind, in that you're now dependent on a fuel supply chain that you maybe aren't dependent on if you're just deploying mini grids and microgrids.
- [44:20]
C
That's true. Although even in the solar and storage technologies there are big international supply chain Challenges? Yeah, there are supply chain challenges for sure. But you're right. I mean, when you look at global supply chains in oil and gas, for example, I mean, one of the great things about having large installed solar and wind and storage is once it's installed, it's entirely local. Your supply chain may have been global, but your operating environment is local. The whole idea of distributed and decentralized resourcing is a big benefit for countries who don't want to be disrupted. It's a huge opportunity. And you're right with nuclear, there's going to be other issues related to that. But it's an all of the above approach. From our perspective, we're not just about solar.
- [45:02]
B
We're recording this the first week of March where there's obviously incredible disruption happening in Iran and the Middle east right now. And it's a, a reminder that fossil fuel based power systems are very subject to supply chain disruptions. Right?
- [45:19]
C
Absolutely. And you know, we have to take a sort of long view on the absolute irreversible, unstoppable trend that we're seeing with some of these newer technologies, whether it's solar and storage, whether it's the next generation of battery chemistries, whether it's SMRs, and there will always be short term disruptions. One of the beauties of philanthropy is we can and we're sort of, it's a luxury that we have of being able to say, okay, well, how do we think about what's going to be needed 5, 10, 15 years from now? And that's really the only thing that keeps us grounded in these tough times.
- [45:53]
B
We're coming up on time for our interview. There's something almost poetic I want to maybe close out with, which is I'm actually reading right now, coincidentally, Ron Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller called Titan, which is an amazing book. It's a tome. It is very long, but an amazing book. And you know, it struck me coming into this conversation that obviously, you know, John D. Rockefeller built his fortunes via Standard Oil, which was really the first global oil and gas company. And you know, here you are in his legacy building a philanthropic effort to drive renewable power, clean power out into the world. You know, would love to hear your reflections on that and maybe even a second reflection, which is also, one could argue the innovation of Standard Oil wasn't the oil and gas part of the business. It was locking down control over the market in which it operated. And here you are actually going the opposite direction of trying to open up new markets to new technologies. So Anyway, I'd just love to hear your thoughts on that legacy in which you are building your efforts.
- [46:58]
C
Obviously, I think about that a lot and I get asked that a lot. And I think it's a wonderfully poetic reality that here's a person who, over a hundred years ago, created a business at a moment in time in our history that was very different from today. And the fact that those resources were put into an endowed foundation that is now working to unleash renewables in order to drive economic opportunity and help address the climate crisis, I think is such a privilege to be part of that. And to your point about the innovation was in the name, right? They're actually literally standardizing a product. I draw inspiration from that part of it. Rather than the sort of market domination, which is we need more modular, standardized solutions that can be rolled out in the emerging markets that we care about. When we're getting to rural Zambia or to rural Malawi or rural Nigeria, these are tough markets and these are places where the challenges can sometimes feel insurmountable. And the innovation that they brought to the product and our ability to then scale and deploy and replicate, I mean, we draw from that. I'm trying to see how do we do that in a 21st century context, given all of the tools we have at our disposal today that John Lee and his colleagues didn't have back then.
- [48:09]
B
Thank you so much for your time.
- [48:10]
C
Thank you.
- [48:11]
A
Thanks Guli Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At mcj, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about mcj, visit us at MCJ VC and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at Newsletter MCJ vc. Thanks and see you next episode.